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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24458659">my heart is yours to break</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/spellingmynamewrong/pseuds/spellingmynamewrong'>spellingmynamewrong</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Check Please! (Webcomic)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Study, Derek "Nursey" Nurse is Unchill, Developing Relationship, F/M, M/M, Pining, i have a lot of feelings about nursey, nursey is a hopeless romantic</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 00:34:30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,458</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24458659</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/spellingmynamewrong/pseuds/spellingmynamewrong</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>For a poet, Derek Nurse is astonishingly bad at love.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Derek "Nursey" Nurse/Original Female Character(s), Derek "Nursey" Nurse/Original Male Character(s), Derek "Nursey" Nurse/William "Dex" Poindexter</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>135</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>my heart is yours to break</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>title is from niki's "odds." this is mostly a character study that i wrote at 3 am because i had a lot of feelings about what it's like to be in love, to want someone so badly and desperately and have it end anyway.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>For a poet, Derek Nurse is astonishingly bad at love. </p><p>Maybe it’s because the love he writes about is metaphorical: love as fire, love as the soft tip-toe of socks on a hard floor, love as Greek deities and heroic epics. Reality isn’t as beautiful. The reality of love is, Derek has found, a mismatched want—love not exactly as unrequited, but as a puzzle piece that just doesn’t fit quite right. Love as convenience, love as comfort, love as a bare necessity. </p><p>Or maybe Derek is just bad at loving the right people.</p><p>The first person he can remember desperately wanting, desperately loving—wanting so much that his heart hurt, not like the small pangs he’d felt in middle school—was Andrew. Andrew, a fellow sophomore on the hockey team at Andover, who had floppy blond hair and the kindest eyes Derek had ever seen. </p><p>He’d first talked to Andrew on one of the days that he really, truly, was in love with Andover, because for all of its faults—all of its reckless privilege, all of its bottled-up anxiety, all of its hypocrisies and ugly contradictions—sometimes he felt more at home at Andover than anywhere else. On those days—days when he fell in love with a text they discussed in Latin, days when he learned that his poetry had been published in the end-of-year journal and all of his friends hugged him deeply and genuinely, days when classes were filled with debates that were stimulating and not unintentionally ignorant—everything seemed to be bathed in flakes of gold. </p><p>It had been a beautiful autumn day, the kind that almost never existed except in paintings, the falling leaves burgundy and burnt orange. He’d finished homework early and had time to go into town with friends, to laugh with them about nothing at all, and then hockey practice had been wonderfully smooth, smoother than it had been all year. </p><p>“You have awesome aim,” Andrew had said after practice, clapping him on the back, and Derek had laughed and said thank you and their eyes had met and <em>oh</em>.</p><p>He’d known Andrew for more than a year by then, of course, but they didn’t really talk. Andrew ran with the future politicians, the kids who took student council and Model UN just a bit too seriously, and Derek’s circle was—well, there was no way to describe it but a mish-mosh, a mix of friends from <em>The Phillipian</em> and Mosaic and Linguistics Club and the few non-assholes on the hockey team. Which, apparently, now included Andrew.</p><p>“You’re Derek, right?” Andrew asked.</p><p>“Yeah.”</p><p>“I thought what you did with Mosaic last month—the whole presentation, on like, perceived racial identity versus internalized self-visualization—was super cool. You totally need to do that again sometime.”</p><p>“Really?”</p><p>“Yeah! You’re an awesome speaker.” And Andrew bumped his shoulder with Derek’s and he knew, right then, that he was gone.</p><p>That night, Derek wrote about a boy with flaxen hair whose soft touch burned, and he called it “achilles reborn,” and he wondered if using Troy as an analogy doomed them already. </p><p>He spent two months in limbo, aching at Andrew’s casual touches after practices, after games, at his wide smiles and loud laughter and effortless charm, because Andrew was the happiest person he’d ever met and what he would give for that happiness to be for him, from him. </p><p>The day Andrew kissed him, softly, kindly, as the snow fell on a January Friday was one of the best days of his life. It was nothing like fire, nothing like Achilles, and for a few months, he let himself dream: of hands clasped together during lunch, of holiday visits, of something beautiful.</p><p>The dream died on an April Saturday.</p><p>“Derek,” Andrew said softly again, sadly, and Derek knew. </p><p>“Can you at least tell me why?” And he knew he sounded like a child, with a whine in his voice, but he <em>felt</em> like one, felt suddenly lost and helpless.</p><p>“It’s just—my parents, well. Like, you know that they literally call Bush Uncle George, right? And I couldn’t—I just couldn’t do that. It’d hurt too much. It’d hurt everything too much.” And of course Derek knew, had heard Andrew rant about it after every call with his parents, loved the fire in his eyes and the conviction he held, the faith that things would be, could be better, and that there could be a world without needless war and hatred and devastation. </p><p>He wondered, briefly, if Andrew was worried about hurting Derek, himself, or his future political prospects. </p><p>“But what does that matter? What, they can stand you attending literally every Obama rally in the state of Massachusetts and running for Communications Director of the High School Democrats of fucking America but not you kissing a boy?” </p><p>It was horribly cruel, and Andrew’s eyes were already rimmed red, and worst of all, when Andrew just sighed like an admission, Derek knew he was right. And God, wasn’t it ironic—that you could run the Gender and Sexuality Alliance and talk of building bridges and write whole essays on how you loved politics just like your family but hated how they welded their power, and at the same time refuse to acknowledge your boyfriend in public and joke about how you wished you could be a minority for college applications and side with your family every time it actually mattered, every time someone besides a Yale admissions officer cared. </p><p>Andrew quit hockey at the end of the year. To focus on academics and the 2012 campaign, he said, and maybe it was selfish, arrogant, but Derek wondered if it had been because of him. Because he had pushed too hard, too quickly. If it, if everything could be better if he hid more, hurt quieter, cared less, smiled wider. </p><p>In any case, the only time they ever spoke again was at graduation, two years later. <em>Congrats on Samwell</em>, Andrew had said carefully, and for once, Derek was happy that Yale hadn’t wanted to recruit him, because he knew there was no way he could spend four more years with Andrew Robinson without it hurting like hell.</p><p>He was both lucky and unlucky to find Claire. Lucky because of how it started; hopelessly, desperately unlucky because of how it ended.</p><p>Claire had been a constant in his life since they entered Andover, a 5’4” Chinese-American girl from Philadelphia with a sharp laugh who lived in bell-bottom jeans and tube tops. Derek was half in love with her before she even opened her mouth. Claire loved bright orange Popsicles and every Audrey Hepburn movie ever made and played the viola because her mother had wanted her to be a violinist, and she told Derek the day after they met that she didn’t want to date until she’d “settled in” at Andover, although he was objectively the most handsome person she’d ever met, even if his only expression seemed to be a stunned gape. </p><p>Really, he’d never had a chance.</p><p>Claire was a writer too, though she claimed to hate poetry. “It’s not that I hate reading it,” she explained. “There’s literally no teenage girl ever who <em>hasn’t</em> called Sylvia Plath her spirit animal. Just—writing it always feels so fake, you know? Like I’m trying to force myself into Emily Dickinson’s skin suit or something.” </p><p>He must have looked exceedingly downtrodden, because she immediately threw herself into a hug (and throwing was the right word, because how else could you explain how Claire Huang was sitting in his lap?) and sighed. “Don’t give me those eyes, Derek, you insufferable poet.”</p><p>“My dearest Claire, you know I must write in verse, for how else shall I express my undying love for you, so like a flame?”</p><p>“Shut up, Nurse, you absolute idiot,” she laughed, and he knew he could never, would never, show her the snippets of poetry he’d written about her. </p><p>
  <em>yesterday in my dreams, you burned alexandria to the ground<br/>
with a match-stick touch, and you called it rebellion.<br/>
you gazed at me with glass and pity stuck in your eyelashes, but before<br/>
our mouths met i found myself dragged to the guillotine with nothing<br/>
but deep blue ocean water in my lungs and an ache i still can’t quite<br/>
scratch out.</em>
</p><p>She was always the one, in these poems, to destroy him. It could have been a premonition, but Derek was never one for prophecy, and even if he was—well.</p><p>Picture Claire, the hot sun beating down on them as she drags him across town to Target because she <em>needs</em> to show him these ridiculous Memorial Day plates, oh my God. Claire, reading him an excerpt from a short story about a son returning to his late mother’s childhood home, her words tender and quiet in a way she never is, while she perches in his lap like a hummingbird and he gazes upon her with wonder. Claire, clapping madly for him at his poetry slam and whispering into his ear with a grin, <em>I’m starting to realize why you love this poetry thing so much</em>. Claire, visiting him in New York City in the summer, pretending to be an arrogant art critic with him at the Met, <em>ah yes, you can postulate with 97% certainty that the red stripe in this painting represents Marxist theory</em>, all while his mother smiles knowingly at him when he returns home at the end of every night and he doesn’t have the heart to tell her that everything she thinks she knows is wrong. Claire, at the end of the summer, telling him that she wants to go to Columbia more than anything else while clasping his hand like a treasure, and Derek, with a seed of hope in his chest that he desperately tries to push down. Picture Claire, and you’ll know—Derek never had a chance at all.</p><p>This time, he was the one to lean in first. It was almost winter, this time, right after Thanksgiving of their senior year, and Claire had been crying—crying because she was sure she wouldn’t get into Columbia, <em>God, how could she have been so </em>stupid, <em>who on Earth would write a supplemental essay about hating radishes, of all things</em>, and Derek had held her as she cried and wondered how horrible it would be to tell her she still looked beautiful. </p><p>“God, I must sound so dumb,” she half-laughed, and for a moment, their eyes met perfectly, and the universe seemed to finally align. She nodded, almost imperceptibly, and he kissed her with the touch of a long-lost lover’s return and the care of a friend.</p><p>Claire got into Columbia, and he tried his best to bake her celebratory cupcakes. They turned out terribly, like lumps of hard clay, but she ate them all the same and called him <em>an idiot, Derek, you could have burned down our entire dorm, but God, I love you</em>. </p><p>He knew, from upperclassmen and passed-down stories, that it wasn’t meant to last—that these senior year relationships, if they lasted through the summer, would end in the fall. That the turkey drop was inevitable, that one or both of them would meet someone else, that they would realize there was something greater, better than Andover could ever be. But he also knew that Claire was funny and kind and talented and beautiful and he loved her more than he had ever loved Andrew, wanted her more than he had ever known he could want someone, and that he desperately wanted it to last.</p><p>Back in junior year, he’d visited Samwell for the second time, and immediately felt at home. He’d also visited Columbia for the hundredth time, and hated it like he had every time before.</p><p>Samwell had a strong English department, hockey, Jack Zimmermann, Shitty Knight, a strong community, and nature. Columbia had the first, barely the second, and none of the others. The choice, back then, had been easy. But now Columbia had Claire, and for a brief moment at the tail end of December, he considered telling Samwell that he’d suffered a horrible accident and would never be playing hockey again and then calling up Columbia’s coaches to beg for reconsideration. </p><p>He didn’t do it, of course. Columbia felt like a facsimile of home, like artificiality and coldness. Samwell felt like what he knew his home to be, small enough to be comfortable but large enough for him to explore, always ready to welcome him in. It was the right choice, he knew, but—</p><p>He tried, in any case, to box it out of his mind. He spent the spring with Claire in a happy daze, driving down to Philadelphia to finally see the Liberty Bell (<em>I told you it’s actually super unimpressive</em>, she’d laughed, but sharing the Philly cheesesteak afterwards had made it all worthwhile), writing horrifically dirty limericks that he performed dramatically to make her laugh whenever the bags under her eyes became too dark, dancing with her to Taylor Swift (<em>to fulfill my childhood dream, of course</em>, she’d explained before she put on “You Belong With Me”) in the middle of the night.</p><p>She came to visit again in July, and he felt like he was floating on air. He told her he loved her, every day, and she told him back, and in one moment of ridiculousness, while they were walking through Central Park and she compared a particularly unfortunate-looking tree to a rocket ship, he wondered what it would be like to marry her.</p><p>She’d wanted to break up, at the end of the summer. “It’ll hurt less,” she explained. “I don’t want us to have some horrible blow-out fight in October, you know? I love you too much for that.”</p><p>He’d convinced her to stay. “But what if we don’t?” he rebutted. “Shouldn’t we at least try?”</p><p>She’d swallowed hard and smiled cautiously, and then, as if to avoid answering, asked him for a piggyback ride. </p><p>They lasted not until October, but until, somehow, the next April, and apparently Eliot had really known what he was talking about in “The Waste Land.”</p><p>Claire loved New York, but at some point, New York had stopped loving her back. When Derek had left for Samwell, they’d promised to Skype every other day. Slowly, every other day became every three days became every week, and every time, Claire looked sadder, looked more withdrawn, looked less like the Claire Derek knew and loved more than air.</p><p>“How are you really doing?” he finally asked in February, and she burst into tears. She loved Columbia, loved the city, loved the Core, loved her major, but not the people, not the isolation, not the sense that she was always drowning and could never come up for air quickly enough. </p><p>He tried to help, tried to comfort her as she cried shuddering, silent tears, but—more than two hundred miles away, it just wasn’t the same. Not the first time, not the second time, not the last time. </p><p>She ended it on a Tuesday. That weekend, she’d taken the train up to Boston, and she’d fallen into his arms the moment she saw him. They’d spent Saturday and Sunday roaming the city, Monday at Samwell, where she’d met his friends and tried Bitty’s pie and laughed at the terrible jokes Jack tried to make, and for those three days, Derek let himself dream again. </p><p>And then came Tuesday. “Derek, I don’t think we can do this anymore,” she said with tears in her eyes while they sat on a bench in the Boston Common, and he wanted more than anything else to comfort her, to kiss her, but he knew that would only make it worse.</p><p><em>It’s too far</em>, she said. <em>It’s hurting both of us. I don’t want to be a burden. I don’t want to be your whole freshman year, and I don’t think you want to be mine either. I love you so, so much still</em>, but all he heard was “I don’t think we can do this anymore” echoed ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times. </p><p>And the worst part was that he knew she was right—that it hurt, now, that it wasn’t the same and couldn’t be the same, not with distance, not with an almost invisible lag between every word they said. He knew she was right, and he still loved her because he didn’t know what to do besides love her, even as she spun out of his life, and he wondered if it could have been different if he’d chosen Columbia. Still wonders, sometimes.</p><p>And now, there is Dex. William Joseph Poindexter, with red hair and freckles <em>everywhere</em> and anger always a sideways glance away from boiling over. Dex, with his hard edges that hide softness, that hide his obvious love for everything around him, and this time, Derek might have had a choice at first, but he sure as hell doesn’t anymore. </p><p>And, because the universe hates him in the end, no matter how it might sometimes align, Derek knows that Dex does not—cannot—want him back. Because even though Dex has shed his freshman-year opinions, his casual homophobia and thorns, and replaced them with fierce love and pies and protection, Dex still will never want Derek. Because even if Dex likes boys, he could never like Derek in the way that Derek wants to be liked, only ever in playful wrestling matches and bro-hugs. Because Derek knows Dex, knows him as well as he knew Claire, and where he could sometimes see flitters of want in Claire’s face after he read her poetry, he only ever sees friendly affection in Dex’s. </p><p>So he’ll settle for friendly. It’s better than what they had before, undoubtedly, and sometimes, when Dex falls asleep on Derek’s shoulder while they’re watching an old movie, he can imagine that Dex does want him, does love him. It just—hurts, sometimes. Hurts when Jack comes to visit Bitty and the love in their eyes is visible from miles away, hurts when he lets himself imagine Dex looking at him in the same way. </p><p>And here they are now, on a Saturday night, Dex fast asleep on Derek’s shoulder. Again, because the universe hates Derek, Dex had picked <em>Breakfast at Tiffany’s</em> (<em>my sisters love it</em>, he’d explained)—Claire’s favorite. Derek knows every line, every scene, and he still wants to cry every time at the end. Dex’s been asleep, somehow, since the party at Holly’s. Derek has never met anyone who hates movies so much. Or do movies hate him? Humming “Moon River” quietly to himself, he spins a ridiculous tale in his head, in which a young Dex was cursed by a witch to never be able to sit through anything longer than a twenty-two minute sitcom episode without falling asleep. Maybe it’ll be a good bedtime story for the Waffles. </p><p>Dex moves slightly, and Derek sighs quietly at the peaceful look on his face—apparently not quietly enough, because Dex blinks open an eye. </p><p>“Wha’ time is it?”</p><p>“Only ten o’clock, my Dexerella. You’ve got time before the ball ends, so start dancing!”</p><p>Dex snorts. “Sorry I fell asleep again.”</p><p>“Nah, don’t worry about it. It’s only, like, the twentieth time.”</p><p>“I’m trying!”</p><p>“I know,” Derek sighs fondly—maybe too fondly, because Dex looks at him suspiciously.</p><p>“Did you draw a dick on me while I slept or something?”</p><p>“I am twenty-one-years-old, William, and I do not engage in such nonsense! Oh ye of little faith,” Derek sighs dramatically.</p><p>“I think I would believe that more if you didn’t literally do that a month ago,” Dex says.</p><p>“Maybe,” Derek acquiesces—maybe too fondly again, because Dex is still looking at him. Less suspiciously now, more—curiously?</p><p>“Why do you watch movies with me when you know I’ll fall asleep?” Dex asks, and Derek has no way of answering without sounding like some lovestruck sop. Which he is, yes, but he doesn’t have to <em>sound</em> like one. </p><p>“Strength training,” Derek lies. “It’s like a checking clinic, but for your ability to watch a movie the whole way through and appreciate it.”</p><p>“Sure,” Dex rolls his eyes.</p><p>“And because you’re my friend,” Derek adds too softly, and there it is—there’s the lovestruck sop in him, coming out without any warning at all. He waits for the sad judgement, the pity, but Dex is still looking at him curiously. Almost caringly. </p><p>“You’re my friend too,” Dex replies with a flush, and <em>oh</em>. </p><p>Carefully, quietly, Derek takes Dex’s hand and squeezes it.</p><p>Dex squeezes back.</p><p>For a poet, Derek Nurse is astonishingly bad at love. But maybe he’s getting better.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>mosaic is an andover society for multiracial students. the phillipian is andover's student-run newspaper, which nursey Definitely wrote for. there is actually a target in andover. linguistics club and the gender and sexuality alliance are real too. the painting briefly referenced when claire and derek are at the met is based off one i actually saw that was painted in the wake of wwii. also, audrey hepburn is wonderful.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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